Just when you want to look around you have to keep your eyes on the road. There were water and power hook-ups in neat rows that had long since been the same outfit that organized the Mexican caravan we ran into in Veracruz, Mexico. What we could have, should have, or would have doneβthese kinds of thoughts follow an if-then logic. Miller recounts how, when the musician Melissa Etheridge and her partner decided to have children, they faced a decision: for their sperm donor, they considered one of two friends, David Crosby or Brad Pitt.
They chose Crosby. The idea that I, myself, could also be someone else seems to exploit a loophole in language. The words make a sentence without making sense. And yet the senselessness of the wish to be someone else may be part of the wish. We want the world to be more porous and lambent than it is. It opens by the sea in Mexico, where Stanley is walking on an esplanade. He thinks of how his father once walked on a similar esplanade in Cuba.
Step by step, he imagines alternative lives for his father and for himself. What if his father had transformed himself into a woman, and Stanley had been the child of his father and his uncle? Such stories satisfy us deeply because they reconcile contrary ideas we have about ourselves and our souls. But, on the other, we feel that there is some fundamental light within usβa filament that burns, with its own special character, from birth to death.
We want to think that, whoever we might have been, we would have burned with the same light. This vision seems impossible. As Sartre says, we are who we are. When we first meet people, we know them as they are, but, with time, we perceive the auras of possibility that surround them. Ramsay, its central character, is the mother of eight children; the linchpin of her family, she is immersed in the practicalities of her crowded, communal life.
The details of life seem to her both worthy of attention and somehow arbitrary; the meaning of the whole feels tied up in its elusiveness. One night, she is sitting at dinner, surrounded by her children and her guests.
